Even in that galaxy of heroes and heroines, muddlers and villains that made up the Special Operations Executive, Harry Peulevé stood out, for courage and tenacity. Not many men, having broken a leg on a parachute jump into occupied territory, came out a cripple over the Pyrenees and promptly asked to go back again. No one else managed an escape from Buchenwald, ending up a few months later in the American lines with two SS prisoners in tow.
There have been a lot of weak books about the exploits, and the failures, of SOE. It is a relief to read a different one. Nigel Perrin has been through all the papers that have now turned up at Kew, as well as getting hold of various surviving members of Harry's family and reading the books that are worth pursuing on the subject, while keeping clear of the junk that still abounds. He dispels a good many myths and displays the truth about a genuine hero; for whom, after what he had been through in war, peacetime life turned tame.
Neither in Great Britain nor in France, from both of which his ancestors came, both of which he served in war, nor in Denmark where he has left a family, nor anywhere where free men and women gather, should Harry Peulevé be forgotten. His life, described below, provides a splendid example of what a single soul can do, if he has stout friends to help him and a sound cause for which to fight.
M.R.D. Foot